The pilot of the caravan had helped take horse-thieves in his time, and he considered this a similar excursion. He dismounted swiftly, but with an air of caution, and as he let down the carriage steps, said he thought they better surround the house.
But Mrs. Tracy reached the ground as if she did not see him, and ran through the open gate with her black draperies flowing in a rush behind her. Robert Day and aunt Corinne were anxious to follow, and the man tied Grandma Padgett's horses to a rail fence across the road, while some protest was made among the fly-bitten row against the white cover of Zene's moving-wagon.
Although Bobaday felt excited and eager as he trotted up the grass path after Mrs. Tracy, the spirit of the country Sunday-school came out of doors to meet him.
There were the class of old men and the class of old women in the corner seats each side of the pulpit, and their lesson was in the Old Testament. The young ladies listened to the instruction of the smart young man of the neighborhood, and his sonorous words rolled against the echoing walls. He usually taught the winter district and singing schools. The young girl who did for summer schoolmiss, had a class of rosebud children in the middle of the meetinghouse, and they crowded to Her lap and crawled up on her shoulders, though their mothers, in the mothers' class, shook warning heads at them. Scent of cloves, roses and sweetbrier mingled with the woody smell of a building shut close six days out of seven. Two rascals in the boys' class, who, evading their teacher's count, had been down under the seats kicking each other with stiff new shoes, emerged just as the librarian came around with a pile of books, ready to fight good-naturedly over the one with the brightest cover. The boy who got possession would never read the book, but he could pull it out of his jacket pocket and tantalize the other boy going home.
The Sunday-school was a wholesome, happy place, even for these young heathen who were enjoying their bodies too much to care particularly about their souls. And when the superintendent stood up to rap the school to order for the close of the session, and line out one of Watts's sober hymns, there was a pleasant flutter of getting ready, and the smart young man of the neighborhood took his tuning-fork from his vest pocket to hit against his teeth so he could set the tune. He wore a very short-tailed coat, and had his hair brushed up in a high roach from his forehead, and these two facts conspired to give him a brisk and wide awake appearance as he stepped into the aisle holding a singing book in his hand.
But no peaceful, long-drawn hymn floated through the windows and wandered into the woods. The twang of the tuning-fork was drowned by a succession of cries. The smart young man's eyebrows went up to meet his roach while he stood in the aisle astonished to see a lady in trailing black clothes pounce upon a child strange to the neighborhood, and exclaim over, and cover it with kisses.
CHAPTER XXIII. FORWARD.
Some of the boys climbed upon seats to look, and there was confusion. A baby or two in the mothers' class began to cry, but the mothers themselves soon understood what was taking place, and forgot the decorum of Sunday-school, to crowd up to Mrs. Tracy.
“The child is hers,” one said to another. “It must have been lost. Who brought it in here?”